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A review by mburnamfink
The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
5.0
The Windup Girl is the first true scifi masterpiece of the 21st century. Bacigalupi images a world ravaged by genetic plagues unleashed by big agrotech companies that are now the only source of clean calories for the desperate survivors. Nations have fallen under the hammer blows of climate change, the end of oil and globalization, the horsemen of famine, disease, and war, but somehow the Kingdom of Thailand and the city of Bangkok hang on, defended by the fanatics of the Environmental Ministry and sustained by a secret seed bank. But the city seethes with unresolved tension between the corrupt and overbearing white-shirts of the Environmental Ministry, and the outside looking Trade Ministry.
Into this powder keg walks Anderson, an undercover agent for AgriGen, looking to ferret out how the Thais have resurrected plant species dead for centuries, and to seize the incalculable genetic riches of their seedbank. Anderson employs Hock Seng, a Malaysian Chinese refugee who was once a shipping tycoon, but who lost everything in a terrifying fundamentalist revolt. Jaidee and Kanya are officers in the Environmental Ministry, trying to balance honor along a knife-edge of survival. And Emiko is a New Person, a post-human genetic construct illegally abandoned in Thailand, and now reduced to the status of a most debased whore. The ambitions, desires, and plans of these people swirl around each other, as Thailand lurches towards disaster.
Bacigalupi uses a truly diverse cast of viewpoint characters to explore a byzantine plot, while describing a lived-in world comparable only to Neuromancer in its depth and realism. The diseases, the hunger, the crude work arounds for an absence of fossil fuels and cheap electricity, all carry the bronze ring of truth. I can practically smell the fruit rotting from blister rust, and the megadonts (genetically engineered elephants) winding the spindles of industry. One of the most clever bits of setting building are the cheshires, chameleon shifting cats who have completely replaced domestic Felis catus, and who have devastated a bird population that can't dodge predators with active camo.
This book speaks directly to current anxieties: over food security, over climate change, over globalism and national sovereignty. Bacigalpupi does not flinch away from the implications of what he writing. Our current civilization of high energy fossil fuels, what his characters refer to as the Expansion, is doomed. The plagues and sterile seeds of the Calorie Companies are a collective suicide from people who prefer genocide to loosening their grip on power. Nature is helpless before the artificial evolution of genetic engineering, which can only make ever more perfect parasites. The characters have accepted their death, even as they struggle against it.
There's a kind of ambiguous hope in the end, that a new ecosystem of genetically modified organism may stabilize, but for us, nothing.
*****
The blurb on the front of my copy compares this book to Neuromancer. I can only second that comparison, and say that this is a very good book about the classic elements of human tragedy: power, ambition, lust, and fear, set in a stunningly well-realized setting that seems both incredibly exotic and all too familiar. Read this. Now.
(From July 23, 2011. Updated for the Hugo Reread project)
Into this powder keg walks Anderson, an undercover agent for AgriGen, looking to ferret out how the Thais have resurrected plant species dead for centuries, and to seize the incalculable genetic riches of their seedbank. Anderson employs Hock Seng, a Malaysian Chinese refugee who was once a shipping tycoon, but who lost everything in a terrifying fundamentalist revolt. Jaidee and Kanya are officers in the Environmental Ministry, trying to balance honor along a knife-edge of survival. And Emiko is a New Person, a post-human genetic construct illegally abandoned in Thailand, and now reduced to the status of a most debased whore. The ambitions, desires, and plans of these people swirl around each other, as Thailand lurches towards disaster.
Bacigalupi uses a truly diverse cast of viewpoint characters to explore a byzantine plot, while describing a lived-in world comparable only to Neuromancer in its depth and realism. The diseases, the hunger, the crude work arounds for an absence of fossil fuels and cheap electricity, all carry the bronze ring of truth. I can practically smell the fruit rotting from blister rust, and the megadonts (genetically engineered elephants) winding the spindles of industry. One of the most clever bits of setting building are the cheshires, chameleon shifting cats who have completely replaced domestic Felis catus, and who have devastated a bird population that can't dodge predators with active camo.
This book speaks directly to current anxieties: over food security, over climate change, over globalism and national sovereignty. Bacigalpupi does not flinch away from the implications of what he writing. Our current civilization of high energy fossil fuels, what his characters refer to as the Expansion, is doomed. The plagues and sterile seeds of the Calorie Companies are a collective suicide from people who prefer genocide to loosening their grip on power. Nature is helpless before the artificial evolution of genetic engineering, which can only make ever more perfect parasites. The characters have accepted their death, even as they struggle against it.
There's a kind of ambiguous hope in the end, that a new ecosystem of genetically modified organism may stabilize, but for us, nothing.
*****
The blurb on the front of my copy compares this book to Neuromancer. I can only second that comparison, and say that this is a very good book about the classic elements of human tragedy: power, ambition, lust, and fear, set in a stunningly well-realized setting that seems both incredibly exotic and all too familiar. Read this. Now.
(From July 23, 2011. Updated for the Hugo Reread project)